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My first proper portrait.

Click the picture for a larger version.




Comments are always welcome !

can you give us more details about the pic - lens, aperture, etc...

i can't tell whether the pic has been PP'd or if it's the setting used but to me it's a bit soft. judging by the fact that only her eyebrows are sharp and the rest of her face a bit softer, I'm going to take a potshot and say that the DOF is too short. I'd be more incline to have her whole face sharp than just a portion of it.

What I do like though is how you've managed to capture the highlights in the woman's eyes.

Very lovely lady and I'd suggest doing a reshoot

Oh sorry ! I should have posted the picture data here (it's there on the image).

Lens = Nikkor Micro AF 105mm 2.8D
Focal Length = 105mm
Aperture = f/3
Shutter speed = 1/40
ISO = 350

In a room with white walls and ceiling. Wireless SB-800 at full power firing up at the ceiling.

As for PP, only the left side was retouched as there was an ugly bed frame that I had to clone out.

nice lighting ........ but I find that the crop to my taste is a little too tight......

AsWayne has suggested, this image is very soft. Her eyebrows are in focus, but the rest of her fce - even her lips - are not.

Perhaps this is what you were seeking, but to my eyes it doesn't present as well as I think it could were more of the image in focus.

Stop the lens down to at least f/5.6 and reshoot, and see how that looks.

In fact, I'm rather puzzled by the exposure details on this image. SB800 at full power, fired at the ceiling, but f/3, 1/40 and ISO 350?

How big was the room? The exposure settings are suggesting a lot of light loss despite shooting at full power on the flash. Further, if the flash is the primary light source, 1/40 going to potentially be the cause of some image softness with the 105 because you may introduce some camera shake.

Unless there was some significant ambient light present, shooting at 1/125 or 1/250 might have been a better option.

Finally, could you please bring your signature line into line with our requirements here, which state that it may be no more than four lines. We feel that there's something wrong when a person's signature line is longer than their messages.

G'day,

Just found this thread and as I don't think I've ever taken a photo of a person before (Ha, all my stuff is animals and landscape sort of stuff) and I"m doing a portrait workshop this week-end, so I wanted to have a sticky nose... I'll try to give my very, very portrait newbie virgin impressions

I don't know the first thing about portraiture (but looking forward to the week-end ) but this looks as though the focus is in front of the eyes, making the eyebrows and the tip of her nose look sharper than her eyes... I think if the focus was more on the eyeballs, this would work better for you, and bring up the eyelash details too...

Not sure about the framing/crop, maybe if the frame was just a smidge to the right to include the edge of her face and less open white background space on the left???

Not sure about multiple catchlights in the eyes, maybe tempted to cloen out the smaller one of each pair???... Terrific pose...

Take my ramblings with a grain of salt, just rabbiting on... Tis a lot better than I've done with a human Good stuff...

It was a big room. Very high ceiling and very wide too. Very little ambient light. Also, the flash was placed quite far away from the subject. I wanted even illumination and I think this setup worked a bit.

As for the pic being soft, yep, that is what I intended too but somehow wasn't able to get it right. There's no camera shake in there but DOF was too shallow to get the lips sharp I guess.

As for the cropping, unfortunately, this is how it came out from the camera (a perfect exmample of bad composition and framing!). In fact, I added a little white area to the left myself (its perhaps best to remove it). I did try a few more times but wasn't able to get quite the pose I got the first time around. That was impromptu !

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. I will definitely retry the whole thing again someday.